The task of the study is to present the development of the genre in the 18th century as a complex, contradictory process of introducing painting into Russian everyday life, created simultaneously by many and in different directions, undoubtedly dramatic in its final results and in its own way reflecting the contradictions of Russian public life. The very diversity and artistic inequality of the works, so embarrassing with a purely aesthetic or systematizing approach, is largely explained precisely from the point of view of the dynamics of this process. At the same time, all the well-known material becomes necessary with all the things in it that artistically may appear weak, imitative and even insignificant, but which in historical terms turns out to be undoubtedly remarkable as an indication of those opportunities that declared themselves at an early stage in the development of the Russian genre.